Hello and welcome to the political orphanage. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, and I've got a question for you, listener. What would you do with a billion dollars?

Me, I buy lottery tickets, maybe three, four times a year. I don't

think I'm actually going to win. What I think is, there's a non-zero chance that I might.

So what I'm basically doing is paying $2 for admission to fantasize about winning the lottery.

And it's a fun fantasy. I actually think it's a pretty good use of my money

when you consider all the other dumb stuff I buy regularly. It's significantly cheaper than buying a

ticket to a movie, which, at least on one occasion, turned out to be megalopolis. So let's say you

suddenly come into a billion dollars.

What would you do with it?

And if you decided to use it for good, how would you know that you were maximizing that

money rather than just spending it to make yourself feel better?

I'm going to let you noodle that for a moment.

And while you do, I'm going to tell you a related story about pine trees and guilt,

which will seamlessly reintegrate with the aforementioned billion dollar question from a moment ago.

A couple of years back, I figured out what my estimated carbon footprint is,

and I decided I'd try to offset it, become a carbon-neutral heating. Not only would I do my part

to combat global warming. I'm an avid camper. I like forests. They're my favorite biome. So just in

general, I like the idea of planting trees, even if they didn't do anything.

But nominally, I wanted to try to offset my carbon footprint.

And almost immediately I ran into trouble.

To start with, I discovered that the type of tree matters.

Some trees absorb more carbon than others.

...